


Cuts Deeper

by Sholio



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Slavery, Episode Related, Episode: s01e04 Cyberwoman, Flogging, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Whipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:34:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26318023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: In a world where public floggings are commonplace ...Cyberwomanhappens.
Relationships: Gwen Cooper & Jack Harkness & Owen Harper & Ianto Jones & Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper & Ianto Jones
Comments: 13
Kudos: 45
Collections: Alternate Universe Exchange 2020





	Cuts Deeper

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



> Content warning: detailed descriptions of flogging for punishment. Please read only if you feel able to.

"I can't believe he came back," Owen said.

It was Tosh who'd spotted Ianto on the monitors. Now the three of them — Owen, Tosh, and Gwen — were sitting up on a balcony, looking down at the floor of the Hub and watching Ianto walk in, his body language visibly hesitant. As well it might be, Owen thought vindictively: bastard tried to kill them all with a bloody Cyberman in the cellar not two days ago.

"Where else is he going to go?" Tosh asked softly. "Where else _could_ he go?"

"Anywhere?" Owen shot back. 

Gwen hushed him, but Ianto was paying no mind; all his attention was on Jack. Even from up here Owen could see that Ianto was perfectly put together as always, suit pressed and not a hair out of place. _Made of ice, isn't he_ , Owen thought, and deliberately let his mind slide away from the image of Ianto two days ago, crying and screaming and begging them not to kill the _thing_ that used to be his girlfriend.

Now he was standing on the floor of the Hub, looking up at Jack's office with his entire body a wound-up ball of tension. Jack stood above, looking down through the glassed-in office wall, face expressionless. 

Although Jack hadn't looked their way or acknowledged them at all, he almost certainly knew they were up here. If he hadn't seen them go up here, he could have just checked their monitor chips, though Tosh had a known history of finding ways to circumvent hers.

"I'm bloody serious though," Owen went on, more quietly. "He's got more options than the rest of us, doesn't he? Ask to have his contract bought out by someone else —"

"Would Jack say yes?" Gwen asked.

"Course he would, probably wouldn't say no if any of us asked." Though privately, Owen had to wonder if Jack really would let Ianto go that easily. None of _them_ had brought a killing machine into the Hub. "Tea boy could serve out the rest of his indenture in a nice cushy office doing data entry. But that's not his only option, is it? You can't tell _me_ he doesn't know how to dig out a chip and fake up an identity, not after everything he's done round here. Contacts, he's got those too. Somehow he found that poor sod she killed, could know plenty others from back in the London days. There was a _lot_ of contract labor went missing when Torchwood One fell."

"Really?" Gwen said, turning to look at him.

"That's a rumor," Tosh said, her voice small. "We don't know. They were declared dead —"

"We didn't know Lisa Hallett, or what's left of her, was down in the basement, either. You think anyone indentured to fucking Torchwood wouldn't jump at the chance to run? Nobody knew Ianto Jones was alive, either, 'til he walked in here. Hell, why'd he come back anyway? He was _out,_ the fucking moron."

"We wondered why," Tosh said softly, to Gwen. "Owen and Suzie and me. It didn't make any sense. Now we know, I suppose."

She looked down to the floor of the Hub again. So did Owen. Jack had left his office, was walking down the stairs. Ianto just stood there, waiting.

"Doesn't explain a damn thing," Owen muttered. "He's still a slave like the rest of us."

"Owen," Tosh said, "don't _say_ that—"

"What? Call it like it is. You've still got five sodding years left on your contract; you think any of us is going to survive that long?"

"It's not that bad, though, is it?" Gwen asked, and Owen shot her a glare. He wasn't in a mood to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, let alone someone who'd only been on a Torchwood service contract for a few months — a sentence she was serving for Suzie's crimes. Suzie, who was dead. Gwen didn't _know_ ; she hadn't been in it for years, not like the rest of them.

He looked down at the floor again, where Ianto and Jack just stood, some ten feet apart, facing each other across the shimmering water at the base of the pillar. 

"No one even knows why Ianto's here," Tosh said. "What he did to get contracted out like the rest of us."

"Might not have _done_ anything," Owen said. "Might've just walked into Torchwood One and told them to stick a chip in him, same way he did here. Fucking madman. We should've guessed anybody that perfect was a psycho underneath."

But he had to shy away from thinking of how much of _his_ own situation was of his own doing: the choices he'd made that had put him here. Tosh and Gwen at least hadn't chosen this life. He would have been free by now, if not for —

"Oh," Tosh whispered, and Owen looked down again. 

Whatever had passed between Jack and Ianto was too quiet to be heard from up here, but Jack had gone over to the wall where the flogger hung. Tosh's eyes went wide; Gwen put her hand over her mouth.

Impossible, Owen thought, his mind a whirling blank. Jack didn't do that. Wasn't like that. Any workplace that used term-contract indentures was supposed to have a flogger hanging up, as well as prisons, police stations — it was a workplace reg, like the exit signs. But he'd never seen Jack reach for the one here, not even once.

His hands shook. He folded one over the other.

"You lot!" Jack said, a sharp bark directed up to the shadows under the girders, and they all jumped. "Come down here. This affects you too."

They all looked at each other. It was Gwen who said quietly, "He's not going to — not _us_ —"

Her eyes were huge, her face pale. _Ah love,_ Owen thought, _it's finally sunk in for you, has it? We all love Jack too, but he's not in this with us. He's the one holding that bloody great flogger down there, not the one on the receiving end._

Tosh had already got up, was heading for the stairs. Owen took a breath, gave Gwen a hand up, and they descended to the main level.

"Have any of you ..." Gwen whispered.

"Not here," Tosh whispered back quickly. "Not Jack."

Her face was stark. Her life had been a hellscape before Jack bought her from UNIT; Owen knew just enough about her to know that.

By the time they reached the floor, Ianto was already stripping off his tie and shirt. Jack stood watching, still with no visible expression, the flogger hanging by his leg, and Ianto moved slowly and mechanically, taking off one item at a time. It was like watching someone peel off armor. Ianto glanced up briefly when they arrived; some hot flash of emotion crossed his face, and then it was calm again, ripples on a still pond. He lowered his eyes and went on unbuttoning his shirt.

It was only down here, with Owen's analytical doctor side kicking in whether he wanted it to or not, that he could see what hadn't been visible from upstairs: the exhaustion on Ianto's face, the eyes so red and shadowed that they looked bruised. From the look of him, he hadn't slept since Lisa's death.

_Had it coming, didn't he? All that and more._

Ianto dropped his shirt on the floor and turned round. Gwen gasped, and Tosh made a tiny hurt sound. Owen's "Christ!" was out of his mouth before he was aware of it. Even Jack jerked before stilling again.

Ianto's back was crisscrossed with the white stripes of old scars. Scar on top of scar, back and forth. Some were thin and old, nearly invisible; others showed signs of old infection or incomplete healing before new ones had been layered on top.

You saw backs like this on forty-year-old, hardened recidivist criminals. Not perfectly put together tea-boys in their mid-20s.

For a long moment, even Jack seemed to be speechless. Then he said quietly, "The shackles."

"Jack, no," Tosh burst out. She wasn't crying, but her voice was hoarse as if she had been.

Ianto only nodded, as if he'd been expecting nothing else, and walked over to the manacles dangling beside the flogger's hook. He fastened the left one himself, and put the right up to the cuff, all with easy familiarity that said he'd clearly done this before. Jack followed, and reached up to do it for him.

"You ever do this with the police?" Owen asked Gwen, low and harsh. He wanted it to hurt her; he had to do something, _say_ something. His nails bit into his palms.

Gwen shook her head. Her eyes glistened. "It wasn't — wasn't my department."

"I have the legal right to punish you," Jack said to Ianto. His voice was cool, his gaze fixed somewhere to the left of Ianto's bare back. "But you have the right to choose a different form of punishment. I'll honor that."

"I won't," Ianto said shortly. He rested his cheek against the wall. "Do it."

Tosh's shoulder bumped Owen's, and he felt her small cold hand brush his. He kept his hand closed into a fist — _no comfort to be had here, love_ — and after a moment Tosh reached for Gwen's hand instead. But she kept her shoulder against Owen's.

Jack swung the flogger. 

Owen wasn't prepared for the way the familiar sharp snap split his skull open, cracking a window to the past. The red stripe that appeared along Ianto's back was even worse — the subtle flinch, the soft involuntary gasp, the smell of blood.

That was a practiced swing, Owen thought, clinging to something, _anything_ to keep him anchored in the here and now. You got a feel for it, when you watched enough of this — who had done it before, who was new to it. Jack had done it a lot.

But then, Torchwood wasn't a nice place. It had been worse, before Jack was in charge. The other Torchwoods had been worse too. The scars on Ianto's back said so.

But Jack's hand had wielded that flogger before.

The flogger cracked again and again. The smell of blood was heavy now, a sharp iron stink. Ianto hadn't screamed; he took it in silence, jerking with each blow. Tears were running down Gwen's face, and Tosh was shivering. Owen realized he had his teeth sunk in his own lip, and seemingly without his conscious direction, his fingers laced through Tosh's, curling round hers.

Owen hadn't been counting strokes, but Ianto's back was running blood when Jack stepped back. There were light blood splatters on his cuffs. "Your crime was against all of us," Jack said, and his voice cracked a little. To Owen's shock, he looked like he was holding back tears. Then he turned round and held out the flogger toward the three of them, butt-first.

Tosh flinched as if she'd been struck. Owen felt a hot flare of anger open up in his chest. This was ... this was _cruel,_ even crueler than the public flogging.

"Do it," Jack said, shaking the handle at them. His face was white. "You know you want to."

Owen had thought he wanted to. He could still remember his white-hot hatred, the vicious shame of knowing that Ianto had played them all for fools, but as he stared at the flogger's handle, it seemed as if those emotions belonged to someone else. The flogger's twined cords dripped blood on the floor.

"Do it or get up there with him!" Jack snapped at them. His knuckles were white on the flogger's handle.

Tosh untangled her hand from Owen's. She stepped forward without speaking. Of course it was her; Jack had pulled her out of hell. There had never been a thing he'd asked of her that she wouldn't do.

Owen wanted to grab her and pull her back, or step in front of her. But he did neither; he just watched as she took the flogger from Jack. She was visibly trembling as she stepped up to Ianto.

"How ..." Her voice cracked. "How ... how many, Jack?"

"As many as you want," Jack said. He tucked his hands under his arms and watched, eyes fixed on the tableau like a man staring into a flame. "Whatever it takes until you're satisfied."

"Jack, don't do this," Gwen said. "Tosh, you don't have to." Her voice broke a little. "Jack, you aren't going to let her go through with this, are you?"

Jack said nothing. He didn't blink, watching Tosh and Ianto.

Tosh's hand twisted on the flogger's handle. She tentatively raised it, then lowered it. She didn't know how. She'd only experienced it from the other side. Owen managed, finally, to unstick his throat.

"It'll hurt him more if you flinch, or pull back too early. Faster is less cruel."

To the extent that any of this was less cruel. He felt sick. Gwen looked like she was struggling not to be ill.

Tosh seemed to come to an abrupt decision. She raised the flogger sharply and brought it down in a single swift crack, opening up a new stripe across Ianto's bloodied back. Then she spun on her heel and thrust out the flogger, butt first, toward Jack. "I'm done," she said in a small voice, and dashed the back of her hand across her eyes.

Jack took it back. Tosh took a few quick steps, not toward the rest of them, but across the bridge and back to the other side of the Hub, where she sank down and put her face in her hands. Jack's gaze tracked her and then wrenched away.

"Who's next?" he asked.

Gwen didn't move — didn't seem to be able to move. Owen said harshly, "For fuck's sake," and stepped forward. Anything to get this over with. He all but snatched the flogger from Jack's hand.

This close, the smell of blood was overwhelming, and it was impossible not to hear Ianto's small pained gasps, to notice the way his bare sides heaved as he breathed. _Gonna hyperventilate like that, mate,_ Owen thought. The handle of the flogger slipped in his sweat-slick palm as he twisted his hand on it. Ianto's eyes were closed, his cheeks tracked with tears.

Owen had seen people take a lot more strokes than this, and he'd also been the one to put their torn flesh back together, after. But he'd never held the actual instrument of torture before. He hated it suddenly, hated it more than he'd ever hated anything in his life: the fucking flogger and all it stood for.

"Owen?" Jack said, voice pitched low, and Owen realized with another surge of burning rage that he was just standing here, forcing Ianto to deal with the anticipation, the effort of keeping his legs straight and not slumping in the chains — it was its own kind of cruelty.

"I'm a bloody _doctor,_ Jack," Owen spat out. His eyes stung. "I _heal_ people."

"It's only to make it right," Jack said softly. "A couple of strokes, then give Gwen her chance and it's over."

"Jack, stop this," Gwen said. She was openly crying now.

Owen bit his lip hard enough to taste blood. Something in him, some barrier broke; he raised the flogger and brought it down hard. Ianto's entire body jerked, and Owen tasted bile on the back of his throat. It _was_ different, doing it yourself — a searing, horrible mix of revulsion and revenge. He hated it, and himself, and Jack.

"I won't," Gwen said abruptly. She stepped over to stand next to Owen, turned and faced Jack, her body between Ianto and him. "I won't. You won't either. This is over."

Owen took a breath, the air so cloyed with blood that it felt like it was clotting in his mouth, and turned away from Ianto's bloodied back. "Yeah. Fuck this." He dropped the flogger, threw it actually, and gave it a kick to roll it away from him. The tails left bloody streaks on the floor. "Beat me too, I don't care. I'm not doing this. She's right, it's done." He could still feel the handle in his palm, as if it had left an imprint.

Tosh scrambled to her feet, wiping her eyes with both hands. She didn't speak, but she came over to stand with them.

Jack looked at them for a moment, the three of them arrayed against him, and then the corners of his mouth twitched a little — and Owen hadn't known he could be angrier, but for a moment pure rage whited out his vision and roared in his ears. He came back down to Jack saying softly, "Yeah. It is."

Jack left the flogger where it was, and stepped past them to begin unfastening Ianto's shackles. Ianto was pliant, sagging onto Jack as he took Ianto's weight with a careful arm around his ribs, trying not to touch his back too much.

"Get him down to the medbay," Owen snapped. He didn't know what to _do_ with this anger; it had no target, so it spilled and overflowed into snapping at Tosh and Gwen, who definitely didn't deserve it: "Someone clean this up." He gave the whip another hard kick, just because he could.

"I've got it," Gwen said quietly, moving to forestall Tosh.

"None of you have it," Jack said over his shoulder. Ianto sagged onto him, half-limp, all the fight gone out of him. "Take a lunch break, you two. I've got this."

"The absolute fuck you do," Owen muttered, but he led the way to the medbay, started pulling out items and setting up an IV. "Put him on the table. On his stomach, God, he's probably in shock and he's going to pass out if you don't get his head down. Don't think I don't know what you did there, Jack," he added as he snapped gloves onto his hands, "and _fuck you,_ you manipulative bastard."

Jack laid a hand briefly on Ianto's shoulder — body language noticeably warmer, the coldness gone but for a vestige, like ice melting gradually to a rime in the shade. "Call me if you need anything," he said, and was gone, back up the steps to the hub.

"Absolute rat bastard," Owen muttered, and went on cursing softly through the process of getting the IV in Ianto's arm: saline, morphine, antibiotics. "Ianto, mate, you hear me? I've got some relief on the way, so you'll start to feel better in a minute."

"I feel fine," Ianto mumbled softly after a moment. "High as a kite, actually."

"That's shock and endorphins, you utter knob. Don't move, I'm going to start cleaning up this mess. Tell me if you need anything else."

There was movement anyway, Ianto's shoulder muscles flexing under the blood; he rolled his arm off the table to clutch at the edge of Owen's shirt, groped his way across it to squeeze Owen's arm. "Thank you."

"God, you _are_ utterly wasted, aren't you," Owen muttered. He gently detached Ianto's hand and laid it back on the table, then got antiseptic and wipes, and got to work.

This was rote, at least. Soothing. Familiar. And after a while, he started talking, because being quiet wasn't really in him — not with all this nervous energy jittering under the surface.

"Never told you what I did before I came here, did I? Oh, but you probably know. Files and all, nobody's got any privacy round here anyway."

Ianto said nothing, but after a moment he nodded a little.

"I was indentured to pay off my mum's debts." And the bitterness still burned, soul-deep. Just turning him out would've been one thing. She'd threatened to do that all through his teen years: _You're nothing but trouble, Owen, the coppers were at our door yesterday, why do I put up with you?_ "Put me in at the age of sixteen, soon as it was legal. But I'd'a been out of it by now if I hadn't put another ten years on the term for medical school." 

He could still remember how much of a good idea it had seemed like then, knowing that with his background, he faced nothing better than long years of manual labor: digging ditches, throwing sacks of fertilizer onto lorries, cleaning up rubbish. 

"And you know what they do with indentured doctors, don't you?" he said. "Hold on, got to stitch up a couple of these. You might feel a little sting." He did the jab, dropped the needle in the sharps bin, and laid a gloved hand lightly on an uncut part of Ianto's back while he waited for it to take effect. Uninjured, but not unmarked. He could feel the ridges of scar tissue under his hand.

"Prison doctor," Ianto whispered, after a moment.

"Oi, so you _have_ read my files, haven't you? Yeah, could've been worse I guess, could've been bought by some mining firm, or the police." He'd heard horror stories. Still, the prison had been pretty goddamn bad. He was four years out of it, thanks to Jack, but the memories and the nightmares still followed him.

"So," he said, reaching for the sutures, "this isn't the first time I've watched someone flogged, or cleaned up after. Not the first. Not the fiftieth either."

"Don't blame any of you," Ianto whispered. "Had it coming. Should've kept going, don't know why he stopped —"

"Shut up, drugs are making you babble, mate." He didn't even disagree — not as a general theory, anyway. Ianto had almost got them all killed. Lied to them for months. _Never knew you had it in you, tea boy ... I could almost admire that kind of duplicity if I didn't have a strong attachment to my own health and safety._

But it was one thing to be angry, think Jack should kick the bastard out, even. Another thing to have Ianto's blood slick and hot on his gloves as he pulled the suture carefully through the skin. It pulled and caught, hanging up on scar tissue. 

Owen's lip was hot and swollen, and it took him a moment to remember that he'd bit right through it.

It was one thing to think — no, to _know_ that Ianto had wronged them. Another thing entirely to hold the whip in his hand and hear the sharp, pained gasp, and know that he was the one who'd done that. Know that he held Ianto's health and life in his hands, that he could have gone on hitting him, and Jack wouldn't have stopped him ...

Or would he?

Better not to know the answer, maybe. Better to know that he'd stopped himself.

"Did you ever ..." Ianto mumbled, and then seemed to lose the thread of the conversation. His eyes were half open, and he was starting to shiver, coming down off the natural endorphin high. Owen worked the needle past another knot of scar tissue. He needed to get this done, get Ianto covered up.

"Did I ever what?" he prompted after a moment.

"This," Ianto murmured. "Them, to you."

"Oh," Owen said, when he'd decoded that. "Did I get flogged, is that what you're asking? Yeah, couple of times. Long time ago."

Back when he was a kid, sixteen or seventeen, a cheeky little arse furious at the world, at the mother who sold him away and the system that said they got to run his life for the next decade, until he'd aged out of all the dreams he used to have, all the plans he'd made to get off the estate and _do_ something with his life — something good and useful. He'd enjoyed the pain, in its own perverse way, the same way he still enjoyed the pleasure-pain of blurring the world's hard edges with alcohol and meaningless sex. So yeah, he _got_ that, about Ianto. There were times when translating the pain to something external, where it could be felt and dealt with, was easier than the other option.

Not that he was going to say that.

Instead, he said, "There, you're done." He stripped off the gloves, balled them up and dropped them in the bin. "Just stay there 'til the drip finishes." There was a blanket in a drawer under the table. He shook it out, draped it over Ianto. "You cold? Need anything? Magazine, a lolly maybe?"

"You're being nice to me," Ianto murmured.

"Lies. I'm not _nice."_ Owen tucked under the edges of the blanket. "If you want a pillow, get it yourself; how's that?"

Ianto actually smiled a little at that.

There was a sound from the top of the stairs, not loud—a slight scuffing, perhaps. Owen looked up. Jack was standing there. He'd changed his shirt, from the one stained with Ianto's blood to a clean blue one. His coat was off. His hair looked damp, like he'd taken a shower or just splashed water on his face.

Owen decided perhaps he was going to stay by his patient for a bit, and so he did, cleaning up little things in the immediate vicinity while Jack came slowly down the stairs.

"How is he?" Jack asked.

"Like you care."

"I do," Jack said quietly.

"Look, I know what you were doing," Owen said. He picked up the sharps container, wished he could throw it at Jack's head, and instead put it back where it belonged. "And I know why. And if you do that again —"

But he had nowhere to go with that: because Jack _could,_ couldn't he? There was nothing they could do about it. File a complaint, maybe, if they felt they'd truly been hard done by. And from working at the prison, Owen knew exactly how far those complaints tended to go.

Jack just stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking at Ianto, exactly far enough away to make it clear that he _really_ wanted to touch but was maintaining what he considered a plausibly deniable distance. "He doesn't look comfortable there."

"You weren't too worried about his comfort when you chained him to the wall and beat him," Owen said, exasperated. Jack just looked at him. "Well, all right, you have a better place, then?"

"There's a bed upstairs," Jack said.

The IV had finished by this point, so Owen detached it and they got him up, one on either side. His skin was cool to the touch, his pulse thready, but he came along with them willingly. He didn't seem to have it in him to protest now, just went along with it, not seeming to care much — but he also leaned into their touch, one of them on each side.

They took him up to Jack's office. Owen had been in the office quite a bit, but he'd never been down to Jack's inner sanctum, so to speak. He wasn't entirely sure how they were going to get Ianto down the ladder, but Jack climbed down first and reached up for Ianto, and Owen handed him down — Ianto seemed half asleep at this point, eyes half closed. He settled without complaint onto Jack's bed, and Owen hopped down after, without asking permission. There was actually a relatively normal bed down here, aside from the fact that it was basically in a bed-sized and bed-shaped bunker.

"Isn't it inconvenient when you have to get up for a piss in the middle of the night?"

"Always asking the tough questions," Jack said. He sat crosslegged on the bed beside Ianto and brushed his hair back, then pulled a blanket over him. Owen felt abruptly like an intruder, but it wasn't like he'd ever let that stop him before. He sat on the end of the bed and leaned against the wall. 

Jack looked at him.

"What? It's quiet down here. Peaceful. I can see why you like it."

There was an abrupt clattering up top, and then Gwen said down through the hatch, "We thought we saw you two come up here."

"How is he?" Tosh asked. She sounded a little shy, hanging back, but Gwen had no compunctions about climbing down the ladder.

"Oh, are we finally getting that team orgy I ordered?" Jack said lightly. His hand faltered on Ianto's hair, but then settled back into its pattern, brushing it back in light smooth strokes.

"Ianto's all right," Owen said, to everyone generally. "For general values of all right, anyway. He's young, more resilient than he looks, and we're all absolute balls at delivering a decent flogging, so he just needs rest and fluids mainly. Tosh, get down here, I'm crimping my neck looking up at you."

"Just a minute, I need to get my PDA so I can finish going over those readings on that alien mine we brought back to the Hub last week," Tosh said. "Does anyone else want anything?"

"Oh, the case file on my desk, please!" Gwen called up. "Thank you!"

"The medical forms too," Owen called after her. "And there are some energy bars in my desk. Skipped lunch again."

"I don't remember inviting all of you down here," Jack remarked.

"Have us flogged then," Owen said. Gwen gave him a horrified look, but he leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. They had to joke about it. It would break them, otherwise.

Tosh clambered down the ladder, laden with files and snacks, and handed them round. There wasn't much room, so she ended up sitting next to Ianto's head, her leg against his shoulder and her back against the wall. She tucked one of the bed's copious pillows behind herself.

Gwen took up a position midway between. After a moment, Jack lay down beside Ianto, body curved carefully as if to cradle him without quite touching him.

 _And two days ago his bloody girlfriend was trying to kill us all,_ Owen thought, but there was strangely little rancor in it. Hell, the things they'd all done. Well, not Gwen so much. Yet. _Give her time, she'll be making the same moral compromises as the rest of us._

It was a sodding cruel life. They could never get round that.

Ianto stirred abruptly, a spasm followed by a little gasp of pain. Tosh reached out quickly, brushing her fingertips in a light dance across his shoulder, as if she'd abruptly remembered that touching him might hurt.

Ianto blinked sleepily and seemed to go a bit tense when he found Jack's face not a foot from his, Jack's eyes half-closed and one hand still playing with Ianto's hair.

"Oi," Owen said. He nudged Ianto's foot with his. "Need more painkillers?"

"Uh ..." Ianto raised his head a little, took in all of them, the bed, the surroundings. He dropped his head back onto Jack's pillows. "No, I ... I'm ..." He didn't seem to know how to finish. Perfectly put-together tea-boy, half wrecked and stunned looking, his dark hair a mess even with Jack's careful fingers smoothing it back into place.

"It's all right, love," Gwen said gently. "We're just getting some work done." She added something quiet in Welsh, Owen wasn't sure just what, but it seemed to do the trick; Ianto relaxed again, easing back into his dazed half-aware state.

"Owen," Tosh said, with her hand resting lightly on Ianto's shoulder, "do you have any extras of those energy bars? I could eat a little something."

"I was thinking we might order pizza," Gwen said.

"On my bed?" Jack said incredulously, without raising his head.

"Wouldn't be the messiest thing that's ever been on your bed, I'd reckon," Owen said, which prompted horrified exclamations from the women, and Gwen tucking her feet up. Jack laughed quietly.

They weren't all right, Owen thought, as he laid his report files across his knees and tossed the requested energy bar to Tosh. But ... maybe, just maybe, he could see the shape of _all right_ from here.


End file.
